Welcome to PinballX. A Digital Pinball Front End.

PinballX is a free digital pinball front end designed for digital pinball cabinets developed by the author of GameEx with components by Headsoft. It is compatible with HyperPin media and databases. Credit to Bill E for creating the first digital pinball front end publicy available HyperPin. PinballX would not have been possible without it or at the very least where it is now.

PinballX is currently a new project created at the end of May 2013 and is in active development.

A Lite version of PinballX is also included specifically designed for windows tablets.

Modern and higher end hardware is highly recommended for pinball cabs with two or three screens due to the demands of multiple high resolution videos and constantly loading high resolution artwork. However, PinballX itself does not demand much itself and the lite version requires next to nothing to run.

Note: PinballX is not free for commercial use. You should contact us before including or using PinballX with your products.

Monday, August 20, 2018

Thursday, August 16, 2018

- Can now rate a table within the front end.

- Company logos can be by a year or year range. Use the following in the filename: Bally (1980), Bally (-1980), Bally (1980-), Bally (1982-1988). There is also now no fixed limit on how many you can have.

- Automatically add new and missing tables. This feature is enabled or disabled under General Settings

- Current Pin2DMD support with the existing DLLs is broken now, so I have included new working versions with the installer. Select the option for Pin2DMD when installing.

- Fixes mouse wheel not working in game manager.

- The install now defaults to a 32 bit install, for both new installs and anyone upgrading from a release prior to this one. If you are not using the 32 bit version select the option on install. It caused numerous support issues previously and it just wasn't a good idea to default to 64 bit in hindsight.

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Thursday, May 24, 2018

This release of PinballX includes both 32 bit and 64 bit version of the software and components.

Your architecture is automatically detected.

However, the issue with 64 bit applications is that any libraries or plugins that interact with them also need to be the same architecture. Thererfore at this time several plugins and other versions of XDMD will not work with the 64 bit version until the authors update them. You can though force the installer to install the 32 bit mode via the included check box. If you are using the PinDMD2 version of XDMD or are using plugins at the time of writing you should select to force install the 32 bit version. Hopefully, fully x64 versions should be available soon.

Generally 64 bit applications are not that faster but there is benefit with multimedia applications such as PinballX as they process audio, display and video. Also, not that it should be required but the application can now use more memory.

I would like to take the time to mention that PinballX is not all my work. We are supported by a lively and loyal team of contributors and moderators.

In addition several components in PinballX, most notably the Setup Wizard are the work of Ben Baker of Headsoft. The software would not be the same without these additional components and the years of help and support from Ben.

Friday, May 18, 2018

Monday, May 14, 2018

My third and final attempt at switching to SlimDX from Managed Direct X.

We basically had to lose full screen exclusive mode for this but even without this everything still runs much smoother in the front end. FPS is perfect for me and the new video framework also runs much smoother with this now.

Saturday, May 12, 2018

- Improved screen grabbing and new video recording features.
- The screen grab key now grabs screen captures for all displays and will format them automatically and save them in the most suitable location. This backglass screen grab hot key has been removed as this now grabs everything.
- New video recording feature. Available via a hot key when a table is launched or direct from the Game Manager.
- Easily created front end media for your tables.
- Videos automatically formatted and encoded to the correct size, quality and format.
- Captures and records videos for all displays automatically encoding and formatting them for you. Driver based capture such as Geforce experience and ATI is supported for the playfield too.
- Also captures pinup topper videos/rendering if available along with directly capturing the PinMAME window if detected.

Saturday, April 28, 2018

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Several fixes

Removed thread locking opening and disposing videos

I just wanted to remind folks that I do realise videos may load a little slower with recent releases but please be aware minimum system requirements for videos are now much lower and both 4k and 60fps videos are fully supported.

Sunday, April 8, 2018

So the second time I tried to move things to SlimDX has been another disaster for PinballX. So I've given up on it and rolled back again to Managed DirectX with this release. All should now be good in the world.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

I believe I have resolved the conflict issues and the DirectX API library has been upgraded to SlimDX again.

In addition in this release all video rendering (as in video files) is now hardware accelerated. On modern systems this means 60fps and 4k videos should not be on an issue. On low end systems video playback should not slow anything down and you should get full fps in PinballX.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

These are mainly performance improvement related releases with general optimizations to key functions as well as rendering and the executable compiles.

This should hopefully result in better FPS and speed improvements throughout although obviously it will be more noticeable on lower end machines.

With GameEx several other areas have been improved for performance such as the Jukebox, loading Game Info, the Movie Library and getting Meta Data.

In addition the YouTube feature is now working again and the Move Library has been improved significantly. Getting Meta Data for the movie library is now much quicker to and downloading music artist and album images is working again.

I also made the decision to make the Media Library and DVD/BluRays on disk features free for all users and no longer a registered version feature.

I am toying with the idea of releasing a sub version of GameEx without gaming features, purely as a free HTPC solution. Please let me know your thoughts on this.

In preparation for the season I, and behalf of all of my loyal team and friends who work alongside me wish you all the best, happy thanksgiving, happy Hanukkah, Eid, Kwanzaa and Merry Christmas!.